The Essex Land Registry Office

In October 2020, the Ontario government ended counter services at all 54 Land Registry Offices (LROs). That means that access to valuable genealogical material (Crown patents, deeds, wills, etc.) can no longer be achieved in person and must be done online through the new OnLand / ONtario Land Registry Access portal.

SWODA (1905) Image: Essex County Registry Office, Sandwich, Ont.; The Township of Sandwich: Past and Present (1909) by Frederick Neal. Page 89

This nostalgic blog post looks back at the old days when three Askins (Col. James Askin, John Alex Askin and J. Wallace Askin) served successively for a total of eighty-three years as Essex county registrars. It is possible, in searching for your ancestors Essex county records, you have come across their names.

The Windsor Star Windsor, Ontario, Canada 12 Sep 1925, Sat  •  Page 24

In 1801, "on the third of June at 10 o,clock in the forenoon, a rider drew up before a tiny building in Sandwich, Ontario, dismounted and walking inside, laid a paper on the table."To be registered please", he said.

He had come over the trails from the British fort at Amherstburg and the paper he bore with him was one of the world's little known treaties - one of the numerous land exchanges between the British Crown and the Indian nations..."

Colorado Mining Town & A Famous Burro

My brother is reading the memoirs of James Moynahan  (1842-1919) (now available on Amazon in paperback or as an eBook) and he shared with me a collection of Historic South Park County photos in a slide show on YouTube (see below).  

James Moynahan, (grandson of Matthew Moynahan of Maidstone, Ontario) was mayor of Alma, Park County, Colorado and the video offers glimpses of the landscape, the buildings and the people in the area during James lifetime.

Source: South Park City: the amazing, authentic restoration of a Colorado mining Boomtown.

James Moynahan (and his many enterprises) are featured in the video as well as a photo of a very famous burro (small donkey) "Prunes" who worked (and later roamed freely) in the South Park area during James' lifetime from 1867-1930.

Family Photos & Negatives

Recently, I de-cluttered a storage closet and found a large number of old family photographs and negatives. Some of the photographs were in pretty rough shape and the negatives were quite old as well.

Many of the negatives in these yellow envelopes had photos from the 1930s

Scanning Negatives With Your Smart Phone

When I told my sister about the large quantity of negatives, she told me that she had downloaded an app to her smartphone called FilmBox by Photomyne! Once I downloaded the app and developed a method for holding on to the negatives (using tweezers), I was able to go quickly and capture images of the negatives on my iPhone.

Negative scanned and colorized by  FilmBox; Left to Right: Grandson Danny and brothers Ernie, Raymond and Gerald Moynahan

 

Dr. Albert Eugene Casey's Blackwater Irish in Ontario

When my brother, sister and I searched for our Moynahan roots in Ireland in 2019, the Kerry locals directed us to the Sliabh Luachra area on the Cork/Kerry border. "That's where the Moynahans are" said the owner of O'Carrolls Cove Restaurant (Kenmare Bay) and sure enough, we found three cemeteries and many, many Moynihan's/Moynahans there.

See blog post "Try Where the Old Chapel Was at Freemount” .

I researched the Sliabh Luachra area and learned that this area was also the ancestral grounds for a Dr. Albert E. Casey (1903-1982), an Alabama pathologist, who collected Irish records from this area obsessively through the 1900s and published them in a 16 volume collection called, "O'Kief, Coshe Mang, Slieve Lougher and the Upper Blackwater"

Fast forward to October 2020, the Essex Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society invited the Olde Sandwich South and Area Historical Society (OSSAHS) to give a presentation for their October 2020 meeting and I learned that some other Irish settlers in Sandwich South (Ontario) were from the same Blackwater area in Ireland as well!. 

Source:"Casey Aid" by Michael Patin http://sites.rootsweb.com/~irlker/pdf/caseyaid.pdf